RUTHFULLY YOURS

Recent violence in Israel, and the subsequent coverage in mainstream media, on the web and especially in a British medical journal, triggered a 5-day educational physicians’ medical mission to Israel in late October and early November. This grassroots trip was planned in conjunction with the Israel Medical Association, with additional programing support from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting In America (CAMERA), Media-Central, NGO-Monitor, Magen David Adom, The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), and the IDF Spokespersons Office through the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories.

The goal was to enable physicians to see directly Israel’s medical actions, beyond the filter of biased news media and international NGO’s. Eleven physicians signed up, most from the USA, but also from Canada and as far away as Sydney, Australia.

Particularly troubling to physicians has been the abuse of civilian populations on both sides by Hamas and other extremist groups. During the summer’s war, Israelis were direct Hamas targets and Gazans were human shields, mutually linked in danger by Palestinian Arab political leaders who had squandered vast amounts of humanitarian aid on weapons, attack tunnels, fortifications and personal aggrandizement.

Palestinian authority figures, including PA president Mahmoud Abbas, now in the ninth year of a four year term, have encouraged violence by exaggerating perceived threats to Islamic holy sites. Those sites, which have been a focus of Palestinian incitement, were holy to Jews centuries before the birth of Islam.

Physicians, who are used to dealing with pain, suffering and death, have been particularly bothered by the use of hospitals as military command posts and rocket-launching sites as occurred in Gaza. This conflict is the embodiment of “needless suffering”, not unlike, for example, cigarette induced lung cancer. Smokers need to quit their cigarettes. Arabs need to cease the hatred.

Perhaps worst of all for physicians, dedicated to evidence based practice, has been the politicization of medical science, by NGOs, academic organizations, and even medical journals, not to convey knowledge or help the sick, but as a form of warfare.

No gratitude expected — but scorn, contempt, derision and backstabbing, this I did not expect.

Bigotry has no bounds. We hear that rioters in Ferguson, USA have found the enemy and it is…the Jews!

Yes the Jews.

Name your “Palestinians” who risked their lives for Civil Rights.
Protesters have been marching with signs equating the “suffering” of blacks with the “suffering” of “Palestinians.”

How Israel got into the picture, six thousand miles away, nobody knows. Reggie Bush ought to know. The football star was up there with the rest of them denouncing the police and while he was at it, denouncing Israel. Maybe someone ought to inform this millionaire athlete that, going back to the 1960s, Jews were front and center for the Civil Rights movement.

They marched with Martin Luther King Jr. The first name (among many) that comes to mind is Rabbi Abraham Heschel.

Many risked their lives and some even lost their lives for the sake of equality. Two (among many) come to mind. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

These Jewish Civil Rights activists were murdered by the KKK near Philadelphia, Mississippi for their participation in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

This is the thanks for all that sacrifice– and please, Reggie, name your “Palestinians” who risked their lives for Civil Rights.

Likewise, I also marched so that Blacks can share with Whites equality and harmony. I expected no gratitude. I did it in the name of justice. I would do it again.

Charley J. Levine, who passed away on November 16, has been eulogized for his work in pro-Israel public relations and information campaigns. But he also played a pioneering and little-known role in researching America’s response to the Holocaust.

Levine was a communications major at the University of Texas-Austin in the early 1970s. He also had a keen interest in Jewish history. He combined these two areas by choosing to write his master’s thesis on “Propaganda Techniques of the Bergson Group, 1939-1948.”

During the Holocaust years, the Bergson Group’s rallies, newspaper ads, and Capitol Hill lobbying played a major role in forcing the Roosevelt administration to take steps, however belated, to rescue some Jewish refugees. Yet when it came time to write the history of the period, Bergson was left out in the cold.

Part of the reason was that while mainstream Jewish leaders were writing autobiographies giving their version of events, the Bergson activists made no real effort to make their case. Political bias was also a factor. Bergson’s roots were in the Jabotinsky movement, and those who saw him as a political rival were not anxious to give him credit for his Holocaust protests.

The Bergson Group received only passing mention in the first books about America’s response to the Holocaust, such as Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died (1968) and Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue (1970). It was not mentioned at all in early Holocaust-related museum exhibits and films.

Charley Levine helped rescue the Bergson activists from the dustbin of history. To complete what would be one of the first master’s theses ever written on the topic, the industrious graduate student scoured old microfilms, visited archives in various cities, and conducted interviews with Bergson veterans and others who were involved in the events of the 1940s.